The Latin conscius does not translate anything like mind or consciousness. Only in the mid-nineteenth century do we find the first attempts to study consciousness as its own discipline. Wundt, James, and Freud disagreed about how to approach the science of consciousness, although agreeing that psychology was a 'science of consciousness' that takes lived biological experience as its object. The behaviorists vetoed this idea. By the 1950s, for cognitive science, mind (conscious and unconscious) was considered analogous to computer software. Recently, (...) the science of consciousness has returned as Consciousness Studies, a new interdisciplinary synthesis of neuroscience, psychology, philosophy, and cultural anthropology. But what is new in this renaissance of the science of consciousness? New first, second and third person approaches all propose to take consciousness itself as a variable. This approach is as controversial as the nineteenth-century science of consciousness--controversy perhaps inherent to any science of consciousness. (shrink)

The Weight of the Nation™ conference was held in Washington, D.C. This article presents the issues and topics presented and discussed within the Food and Water System: Agriculture, Access and Sustainability track. Areas for opportunity are outlined in this article.

We give in this paper indications about the dynamical impact coming from the main sources of perturbation in biological regulatory networks. First, we define the boundary of the interaction graph expressing the regulations between the main elements of the network . Then, we search what changes in the state values on the boundary could cause some changes of states in the core of the system . After, we analyse the role of the mode of updating on the asymptotics of the (...) network, essentially on the occurrence of limit cycles . Finally, we show the influence of some topological changes on the dynamical behaviour of the system. (shrink)

The conclusions of Barbey & Sloman (B&S) crucially depend on evidence for different representations of statistical information. Unfortunately, a muddled distinction made among these representations calls into question the authors' conclusions. We clarify some notions of statistical representations which are often confused in the literature. These clarifications, combined with new empirical evidence, do not support a dual-process model of judgment.

We classify actions of groups of finite Morley rank on abelian groups of Morley rank 2: there are essentially two, namely the natural actions of SL(V) and GL(V) with V a vector space of dimension 2. We also prove an identification theorem for the natural module of SL₂ in the finite Morley rank category.

Mucoidy and cytotoxicity arise from two independent modifications of the phenotype of the bacterium Pseudomonas aeruginosa that contribute to the mortality and morbidity of cystic fibrosis. We show that, even though the transcriptional regulatory networks controlling both processes are quite different from a molecular or mechanistic point of view, they may be identical from a dynamic point of view: epigenesis may in both cases be the cause of the acquisition of these new phenotypes. This was highlighted by the identity of (...) formal graphs modelling these networks. A mathematical framework based on formal methods from computer science was defined and implemented with a software environment. It allows an easy and rigorous validation and certification of these models and of the experimental methods that can be proposed to falsify or validate the underlying hypothesis. (shrink)